ninja mode

I’ve been looking for a Mac application that does this exact thing for about a year now. Calaboration is a little application that (sort of) syncs Google Calendar stuff with iCal, which is super handy since I tend to jump between several computers several times a day and being able to access all that at any time helps.

It’s the end of the semester and I’ve been doing a bunch of work for that lately, among other projects. One big one is a series of illustrations for a children’s book in Spanish called “Chico el Lagartijito,” which may or may not be in print someday.

chico el lagartijito

For whatever reason I’ve been learning a lot about Illustrator lately, which is odd, since I’ve used it for years and have always felt that I had a pretty good grip on it. Mostly it’s been the realization that a lot of tricks that work in Photoshop also work in Illustrator, like sketching on a layer and locking it so I can vector on top of it. Why this never occurred to me sooner, I’ll never know.

One image from a series I worked on several years ago has seen a lot of interesting action lately.

net neutrality poster by ~bugbyte on deviantART

The poster from my net neutrality campaign has been making the rounds of the internet, turning up on various blogs from all over the world if you google it. I get more comments and notes about that design than anything else. (Granted, most of the stuff I put up on deviantart is sketchy and just for fun anyway.) But most excitingly, I got an email a little over a month ago from a publisher who wanted to use it in a couple of college textbooks, specifically in a chapter about internet law. That’s neat in and of itself, but it feels good to know that I made something that is in some way socially and culturally relevant.

The semester is ending shortly, and I’m already diving headfirst into getting application stuff together for grad school. It was around this time last year that I started to seriously outline all my plans for all this. And a year or so before that that I actually decided to go through with this. It hardly seems like it’s been that long at all.

Today in class we discussed the modification of games like Battlezone and Doom for military purposes. Basically, the games are repurposed as military training or recruiting tools. One of the mods we discussed was Marine Doom – a version of Doom created especially for the Marines, modified to suit their purposes. So essentially, it’s just really clever product placement. This got me thinking: I remember some odd years back (way back, like, when Windows 95 was still pretty new) this game that came packed in Chex Cereal: Chex Quest. Chex Quest is a complete modification of Doom, just like the military mods. But unlike Doom or its subsequent incarnations, Chex Quest was completely child-friendly and focused on concepts like good nutrition and collecting healthy food rather than attacking demons. So while the military was busy training its soldiers and attracting new recruits, cereal companies were just as hard at work recruiting consumers via the same tactics. Hmm.

On another note, some considerations/to-dos for my final project:

• find some way to implement the “shuffle” function
• work on story concept
• determine a set of constituative rules
• research similar projects?
• maybe it’s not based in one specific area, but rather could be started from any area (based on simple rules) to create an infinit number of possibilites/final outcomes

And this is my third post here for the day. Hopefully the last one.

If you’re reading this (which is unlikely since I’m pretty sure almost no one does!) please go take a look at our derive project, UB Secrets!

I found this article about researchers using Second Life in combination with equipment that lets paralyzed people control a character and move around in the SL world. (click for article)

It’s an interesting application of the platform, I’d be interested to see where they go with this.

My “cool link of the day” for class this week was vectorpark.com.

I feel that it relates to the class in that it is an interesting interactive experience that doesn’t really classify as a “game,” but rather is more like a childrens’ toy, or a puzzle. It doesn’t really serve a productive purpose other than being entertaining, though if pressed I suppose it could be used to demonstrate various computer usage skills, like basic clicking and dragging, or interacting with elements on the screen.